By: Elizabeth Kwan

As I twirled across the canvas, I painted with no judgment. The result was computed as a landscape of intersecting lines with a white sky and field. I didn’t know what to convey. They looked uncomfortable.
Beside me, the window illuminated a blue scene on my back. Nature shrieks the rumbling of thunder.

While the rain frolicked on the glass window, I prayed for a reason to continue.

As I scrolled on my phone for ideas, an article about a new art exhibition in New York stopped me.

It must have been the storm and fate. I fell into an endless rabbit hole about Imani Jacqueline Brown’s Strike Gulf Exhibition and her fight against climate change.

The Mississippi River near Brown’s hometown, New Orleans, is known as “cancer valley” due to petrochemical plants riding along the water. Not enough care that pollution is changing the mental and physical landscape of homes worldwide. Brown’s home was severely flooded by Katrina, exposing her and others to chemical pollutants mixed in the mush.

Another lightning bolt struck a nearby ditch, creating a spark.

When I faced my too-restricted-of-a canvas once again, I found new motivation. Like Imani Jacqueline Brown, I wanted to lure people with colorful art for them to realize the human activities damaging Earth that is a window to our reality.

No one said it better than Imani Jacqueline Brown: “You might not have noticed, but the world as we humans have known it, as we built it, is coming to an end…

“Other worlds await.”

I named the painting: “It’s not too late.”